She Was Barbie: Glamour-Crack 1
(self-portrait as behind-the-scenes footage)

When I made this I was fascinated by celebrity footage I started watching on TMZ and other blog sites- uneditted paparazzi footage of celebrities. There is little narrative to these videos. Famous people, usually at least a bit fucked up, roll in and out of parties, they drive around with cameras following them, they are on red carpets, far away at an event or a bar. Everywhere is glitter, fashion, flashbulbs and the everpresent gaze of the camera. I found the videos utterly compelling for the aura of glamour, a magic spell of importance, they gave to the actresses even while they did the most banal or indecypherable things. Every nuance of the ‘celebrity performances’ I viewed became interesting to me. I laughed when I told this to my friend, Josh, who is a music video and television director, and he called those videos “quick, cheap, disposable hits of glamour-crack.”

FYI – When I was asked to be Barbie at LG Fashion Week I was sometimes aware and sometimes not aware that my friend Michael was filming me, but nothing in this video is made up.

The Daily Dish: Glamour-crack 2
(self-portrait as early morning TV appearance)

When I was asked to do this interview I agreed to do it if I could have equal shared rights to all of the raw video footage. I have been interviewed on television programs in the past who would later edit and alter the footage “to make good TV.” This editing often portrayed me in a way I didn’t feel was accurate, but was intended to make me (at the best of times) more palatable to mass audiences, more sympathetic, more understandable, etc. Sometimes, I felt that the people handling the footage revealed their own prejudices about trans issues, beauty and plastic surgery in how they manipulated the video footage (and me.) Sometimes I felt they handled the raw footage to hide their own feelings about my trans body which were apparent to me on set.

This video is my re-edit, my representation, and a kind of emotional response and intellectual critique to these experiences. I radically re-editted the footage the station aired. I also added all of the titles.

Thank you to Amira for being such a great sport about it.

Drama Queen Nightclub Projection: Glamour-crack 3
(self-portrait as nightclub projection)

In June, 2009, I went down to Montreal’s to host the legendary Drama Queen party at Tribe Hyperclub. (Past hosts include Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Lepore and Lena Love.) I showed up a day early to shoot a video that the promoters wanted to project on the club’s giant screen above the dance floor throughout the night and on the monitors around the various bars.

I think the early idea was to get some sexy shots, runway, footage, acting like a Pussy Cat Doll, generally giving a fierce tranny effect. Typical “club tranny” stuff.

At the time I was really obsessed with David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Inland Empire, as well as Cindy Sherman’s Centerfold series. I told them I wanted to use those works as inspiration. I also wanted to do something discordant, a video that wasn’t what it was supposed to be, something that would critique what it was supposed to be.

This is what we came up with.

The video was orginally played on a loop so the director cut it again after the party when he had more time to really make it what we wanted.

In order to show it online I put this particular dance track to the video.

I love knowing that the first installation showing of this video was above dancefloor because this video is so unusal.

shoot / spread / stream: Glamour-crack 4
(self-portrait as fashion shoot)

David J. Romero took photos of me all through my video shoot for the Drama Queen night club projection. The idea was to create a fashion spread simultaneously. He produced so many images I liked that I wanted to turn his photography into another project so I put them on an image stream. In doing this what is created is a narrative of “fake” posed moments and “real” candid moments. Romero kept shooting whether I was ready for a close-up or exhausted under the hot lights.

I’d like to point out that the above video ‘skews’ the reality of what it was to be at the shoot. Contrived and uncontrived visual moments were captured and now strung together on a timeline, but the actual shoot took about nine hours from hair and make-up to wrap. I think this ‘telescoped’ version of time heightens the glamour of the shoot so much that it becomes abhorrant.

I’ve used every single the photographer took.

To see the series of photographs David Romero selected (and manipulated) for his beautiful series cut and paste the link below:

http://ninaarsenault.com/2009/08/photo-shoot-with-david-j-romero/

(the following text is an excerpt from Holy Terror, Bob Colacello, HarperCollinsPublishers, 1990)

That was the day that Andy unveiled his latest series of self-portraits. He returned to self-portraiture as regularly as Rembrandt, though I never thought he was trying to find himself. It was more like he was trying to leave an image for history of the way he wished he looked. It was another revision, another lie, though lies in their way tell other truths. These were stunning: double and triple exposure of Andy’s profile in negative, white on black, red on black, black on black. He looked like a calm, neat, beautiful ghost. It wasn’t easy working for a ghost, especially one who wanted to be calm, neat and beautiful, and wasn’t.

But there was something else in these self-portraits too, in the eyes especially, and you only saw it if you looked long enough: the fear, pain, and sadness that were always there, no matter how much Andy tried to silkscreen them out. (pg 373)